Windows 10 – Resource Utilization

Every 6 months, Microsoft releases a major update to Windows 10 (semi-annual channel). To be more precise, it is better to identify Windows 10 releases with version numbers (1503, 1511, 1607, 1703, 1709, 1803, 1809 and 1903). The format is the year and month of the release, so 1503 is March 2015 and 1709 is September 2017.

Microsoft provides ongoing support for the newest 3 versions. When Windows 10 (1803) was released, Windows 10 (1607) support ended. Since Microsoft is releasing new versions of Windows 10 on a semi-annual basis (every 6 months), the shelf life for a new Windows 10 version is roughly 18 months.

I’m curious how each release impacts the system resources, so I ran a few tests. Each test uses the same operating system configuration (default, out-of-box) and the same LoginVSI configuration:

Workload: Knowledge Worker

Duration: 60 minutes

Metric Sample Timeframe: 1 second

Optimizations: OneDrive Disabled

Let’s take a look at CPU, RAM and disk utilization for different Windows 10 versions. These are default installs with no optimizations.

The utilization trend, across all CPU and RAM categories, is up. Each new version consumes more resources, which makes sense. With each new version, Microsoft introduces new functionality to take advantage of the latest technologies. These features have an impact on the CPU, RAM and disk utilization.

However, with the release of 1903, the performance numbers shows a significant increase in overall utilization from previous releases.

Let’s take a closer look at RAM utilization

When a user logs on, they have less RAM to start with than they did with a previous Windows 10 version, with 1903 utilizing the most of all versions to date.

This is why it is important to optimize the operating system (removing things we do not need), which can bring these numbers down. At a minimum, we should at least be looking at optimizing the default applications.